Old News: Occupy LA

Originally Posted 10/15/11:

Thinking about going down to Occupy LA today.  Not that I give a shit. Or rather, not that I think it is a meaningful movement with any concrete goals. And if they did have concrete goals, they would be impossible to achieve.

Not that I’m against them either—while the “I am the 99 per cent” people complaining about student loans seem dopey to me, far worse is this “I am the 53 per cent (of legitimate income tax payers)” canard; the people holding up signs that say  I bootstrapped my way to the bottom attending a state school while working 30 hours a week at a minimum wage job and never having an instant of freedom, now I will buy a shitty house in Phoenix and have kids who will also have to work 30 hours a week getting yelled at by some undereducated jerkoff because they didn’t adequately mop down the little channel between the beef and chicken grills at Arby’s — congratulations, you’re a fucking idiot.  I wasted my youth grinding myself down to the bone in the most debasing manner possible and now I insist that people with billions of dollars be able to contribute nothing, is what you’re saying.

So I’m not going down there to yell at them or argue with them.  Like most people, I am going down there because I think there will be young pretty girls in revealing outfits.  I won’t talk to them, because they need a guy who sings for a band about communism or something, but you reach a certain age and just looking at a nineteen year old’s barely clothed tits and ass is enough.

And you know, it does suck to have just got out of college right when the price of education reached a high water mark; it cost you a quarter million fucking dollars to go to school for four years, and you got out at the exact moment when the job-getting value of all this education became utterly meaningless.  Or, for certain “desirable” white collar professions this fancy education is necessary,  but it is no longer even close to sufficient. You have graduated to a snowball’s chance in hell of being able to work in any kind of meaningfully air-conditioned environment.  And in fact this fancy education now works against you at the kind of it-sucks-but-at-least-allows-basic-life-sustaining-expenses kind of gig that might be available– management at these places thinks you will get bored and move on; they don’t want to waste the time and money training you.  And they’re right, you would move on.  Except there won’t be any place to move  to  for at least a decade.  The shortsightedness of these HR professionals for shitty jobs is that they fail to see that the guy out of Berkeley is going to have nowhere to go for ten years, and hell yes you want him telemarketing.

It’s funny, the 53 per cent movement seems dedicated to painting the 99 per cent movement as rich, elitist snobs.  Overeducated, over-worldy layabouts.  They are saying “we are even poorer than you, and we are proud of it.”  Not necessarily monetarily poorer but somehow culturally poorer– we are the real blue collar bedrock of this country and blah blah blah, and so stop complaining, you lazy rich people.  Stop complaining and let the really rich people keep their money.

I mean, what the 99 per cent movement wants, at least the college kids, certainly is some kind of socialist, redistributive shit to happen.  In their bones, that’s what they want.  Give us money.  They want a jubilee.  A forgiveness of debt.  I don’t know why they have to be so cagey about it, and couch it in demands for nitpicking banking reforms– we all know that’s bullshit.  They want money.  They should come out and say it. French people aren’t chickenshit about this type of thing– we want the government to give us money.  And good!  Fucking give it to them.